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Short answer: it depends entirely on where the footage is stored, and the three methods give very different windows. Cloud plans typically hold recordings for a fixed period set by the tier — commonly 30 days, with some brands and higher tiers extending to 60, 90 or 180 days. A microSD card in the camera loops and overwrites itself based on card size and how much the camera records, which usually works out at a few days to a few weeks. An NVR or DVR with a hard drive gives the longest window of the three, generally weeks to several months, depending on drive size and how many cameras share it.
In all three cases the storage is a loop, not an archive. When it is full the oldest footage is overwritten. So the real question behind this one is usually "will the footage still be there when I go looking?" — and the answer to that is a calculation you can do before you buy.
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Cloud Plan Retention: Fixed Windows, Set by Tier
Cloud storage is the most predictable of the three because the number is written into the plan. You are buying a retention window rather than a capacity, so a busy camera and a quiet camera both keep the same number of days.
Thirty days is the common baseline across the major platforms, and it is enough for the overwhelming majority of real uses — noticing damage, following up a delivery, giving footage to an insurer or the police. Higher tiers on some brands extend to 60 or 90 days, and a few reach 180. Free tiers, where they exist, are far shorter: a few hours to a few days of event thumbnails or short clips, which functions more as a preview of the paid plan than as retention.
Two details matter more than the headline number. First, whether the plan covers one camera or the whole household, because per-camera pricing changes the arithmetic sharply once you have three or four. Second, what happens when the plan lapses — on most platforms stored recordings become inaccessible, sometimes after a short grace period, so cancelling a plan can mean losing the history it held. Download anything you care about before you cancel.
microSD Cards: Days to Weeks, and It Varies by Position
A card in the camera is the cheapest recording there is — a modest one-time cost, for a high-endurance model — and the retention it gives is genuinely variable, because it depends on how much the camera writes.
Three things set the number. Card size is the obvious one, and most cameras cap somewhere between 128GB and 512GB, so check the model limit before buying. Resolution and frame rate set the data rate: a 4K stream writes several times faster than 1080p, so the same card holds proportionally less. And recording mode matters most of all. A camera saving only motion events on a quiet side path might hold weeks of history on a modest card; the same card in a camera recording continuously at high resolution beside a busy street can loop in a couple of days.
Two practical warnings from the pattern of owner reports. Use a high-endurance or surveillance-rated card rather than a standard photo card — continuous overwriting is a much harder duty cycle, and cheap unbranded cards are the single most common cause of recordings that silently stop being written. And remember the card is inside the camera, so it goes wherever the camera goes; download important clips rather than trusting the card to still be there.
If you want to work out the size you need rather than guess, our companion answer on how much storage security cameras need walks through the arithmetic.
NVR and DVR: Weeks to Months, and Continuous
A network video recorder with a hard drive is where long retention actually lives, and it is the only common setup that comfortably records continuously rather than in event clips. That distinction matters: continuous recording means you can go back to a specific minute even if nothing tripped detection then, which is exactly the gap event-only recording leaves.
The window is a straightforward function of drive size divided by total data rate. Because the recorder is shared, camera count is the variable people underestimate — a drive that holds two months for four cameras holds roughly a quarter of that for sixteen. Most consumer recorders ship with a drive sized to give somewhere in the range of a few weeks to a couple of months for their intended camera count, and larger drives are usually a supported upgrade.
Three things stretch an NVR further without buying a bigger drive: recording secondary cameras at a lower resolution than the important ones, using event-triggered recording on quiet positions while keeping continuous on the entrances, and enabling smart compression if the recorder offers it. The full category, including how many cameras a given recorder handles, is covered in NVR camera systems.
How Long Do You Actually Need?
Longer is not automatically better, and the useful figure comes from asking how long it would realistically take you to notice something.
For everyday use — deliveries, visitors, a scraped car, a broken gate — a week is usually plenty, because you notice within a day or two. Thirty days covers almost every insurance and police request comfortably. The case for longer windows is narrow and specific: a property you visit occasionally, a vacation home, a slow-developing problem like repeated minor vandalism you only spot as a pattern, or a dispute where you need to establish what was happening weeks ago. If none of those apply, paying for 180 days is paying for reassurance rather than capability.
The one habit that matters regardless of retention length: when something happens, download the clip that day. Every storage method here overwrites, and every unrecoverable-footage story starts with someone meaning to save it later.